Libidinous ecology
CRISIS Is nature in its essence erotic? And has capitalism – which will make us desire more of everything – overused our very capacity for desire?
Everything we love is transient, fleeting, temporary
ESSAY: It is our self-understanding that is at stake today. With their aggressive, partly inflated subjects, Western technologists, economists and artists have for centuries seen themeselves above nature. In the ecosystem, man is in nature, he is a part of nature, on which he is completely dependent. Can we protect biotopes, habitats, rivers, lakes, soils, oceans and commons? This essay looks at five books examining the ecosystem.
"I do not see beauty in war, but there is beauty in everything"
THE PHOTOGRAPHER: Beauty, suffering, wealth, poverty, superficiality and raped children are different sides of the same coin, says photographer Marco Di Lauro, who spent a week with the Red Cross in Bergamo during the covid-19 outbreak.
China as the leader of an ecological civilization
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: The future of the world depends on China taking its environmental commitments seriously
“It would is not over. Long live what it would be! ”
NATURE: The attempt to control nature's wildness locally has created uncontrolled effects globally. Do we have to freeze and sweat more in the future, or is civilization far wilder?
The fires are natural for the landscape!
The ecology of the landscape: Who is responsible for the fires? With this year's forest fire season in California and Oregon, are we witnessing a new kind of "cultural disaster"?
Being threatened with death can make most people hold a ...
FREEDOM OF SPEECH: The opportunity to say something is always very limited, says MODERN TIMES's regular writer in this essay about different authorities' use of force. Away from today's mass media, an "underground" network of intellectuals has now emerged, including experienced journalists, intelligence officers, renowned professors and politicians.
The Norwegian double standard
ENVIRONMENTAL PIONEERS: The story of the history of Norwegian environmental thinking is an ambivalent portrait of Norway's imagined role as an environmental nation.
The age of panic
KATE stanza: We humans have lost control of the development we have initiated. The catastrophe is a warning that comes too late, and the elites make themselves unresponsive to the danger signals. Can we avoid panicky escape from the common problems?
Dormant ideological viruses
CROWN: Will a far more favorable ideological virus spread and hopefully infect us, the virus that makes us think of another society, beyond the nation-state, a society that realizes itself as global solidarity and cooperation?
Simply earthlings
Migrant: How hospitable can one be expected to be? Those who do not belong anywhere become poets, because they have to invent a new form of world citizenship, writes Alain Badiou.
The pandemic will create a new world order
Mike Davis: According to activist and historian Mike Davis, wild reservoirs, like bats, contain up to 400 types of coronavirus that are just waiting to spread to other animals and humans.
The nature of man's blind zone
A GOOD NATURE? In the philosopher Arne Johan Vetlesen's new book, the environmental problems are a symptom that our thinking is completely wrong. May we perhaps open ourselves to the fact that everything around us is the soul?
Criminal networks eradicate wild species
ILLEGAL Catch: Chinese mafia deals with swim bladders from fish, Mexican fishermen are pressed into criminal activity and police are terrified.
Ambivalent about gene manipulation
GENREDIGERING The new gene technology is putting a lot of risk on patients, parents and researchers. When letting nature take its course becomes controversial, choice itself becomes a problem.
Gonzo interpretation of Surrealism's sorceress
COMPROMISE: The book by artist Leonora Carrington is a journey into the jungle of surrealism, a successful escape from the conventional and a fantasy infiltration of the established.
From individual participation to authoritarian politics
POLICY: Does technology development destabilize modern democracies? China can be seen as a positive counterpart to the West.
A dangerous transhumanism
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE:
Nick Dyer-Whitford is a ring fox in critical studies of technology and artificial intelligence. He also criticizes luxury communism and the so-called accelerationists.
To start all over again
PHILOSOPHY: Hannah Arendt's age-old work explores thinking, freedom, will and the future. Is there anything thought-provoking about our technologically automated communities?
Historical patience
MISCELLANEOUS: Manuel Castells paints a picture of today's democratic decline that is as recognizable as it is bleak.
A counterbalance to today's cruel lack of solidarity
Totalitarianism? The anarcho-communist critic Franco Berardi believes we have overestimated reason and intelligence as a world-changing force.
The finance elite's manipulation of reality
THE PARADOX OF MONEY: Arne de Boever explores how the unstable reality of finance makes people psychotic – and pushes literary realism to its outer limits.
An increasingly nihilistic world
TECHNOLOGY: The world is becoming increasingly nihilistic as it becomes increasingly clear that humanity is unable to take care of it. The challenge Bernard Stiegler takes on is to show the way to an alternative anthropology – in practice as well as in theory.
Future without utopia?
Rees strives as much as the rest of us to separate science from science fiction. He declares himself a technological optimist and political pessimist, but the role of technology becomes difficult to understand without a credible vision of a better world.